The New Republic

I don't know if you've been following the soap opera currently embroiling Portland politics--starring the city's newly elected mayor, Sam Adams (his real name), and the teenage intern with whom he had an affair, Beau Breedlove (also his real name)--but if you're not, you should be. Timothy Egan delivers a nice plot summary if you want to catch up on the details. READ MORE >>

Old Joy (Kino International) The Beat movement in literature is said to have begun in 1952 with Jack Kerouac and John Clellon Holmes. No such specific date that I know is cited for the movement’s spread to films. (Underground film is something else.) The first Beat picture that I can remember didn’t come until almost forty years later, with Richard Linklater’s Slacker in 1991. Since then there has been a fairly steady stream. READ MORE >>

When Eugene McCarthy died a month ago, I rushed to compose what I wished to be a meditation on what the man had meant to me, to my generation, and to our history. But eulogies always suffer from the press of deadlines, and so I decided to get an opinion of what I wrote from a truth-teller I've known since the 1968 campaign. I read my piece to John Callahan, a professor of English at Lewis & Clark College and the author of books on Ralph Ellison and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the harshest of the truth-tellers. READ MORE >>

Reds is both an accurate and a possibly misleading title. It's accurate because the two leading characters devote much of what we see of their lives to Communist activities. It's possibly misleading because the focus is on the people, not the activities. This is not, in essence or intent, a political work; it is biographical. Solanas's Hour of the Furnaces, Pontecorvo's Battle of Algiers, Wajda's Man of Marble are political films, which posit and explore political questions, then strongly support particular action about them: Reds is a patently different order of work. READ MORE >>

THE GREAT DAY arrives. “I christen thee Western Light!” the woman cries. The glass shatters against the hull, the blocks are pulled out; there is a cry from the crowd as the towering mass glides away, gathering speed until it rolls up the water, rocking until it comes to rest, a ship on the sea. READ MORE >>